by Toby Weston
“Thank you, Shaun. Keep working on those bureaucrats. Forget the Pinko academics, money talks. We’ll hire new talent. If we can get the tech declassified and suitably patented, it will be worth ten times what we paid for it.” George turned to Ben. “How about on the Clearing House side, Ben? Are you ready for the town hall?”
“Sure, Pops. Nothing new, really. The new Org is ready. Persuasive Technology has been preparing the ground. Thank you, Shaun.” Ben nodded at the other. “I’ll announce it in...” Ben glanced at a Companion on his wrist “… half an hour.”
“Which of the IFAs are on board?” asked George.
“Err… one sec.” Ben turned to the avatar of his human assistant, who was only visible or audible to him. She held up a small whiteboard on which she had written his prompts.
He read the elegant handwritten bullet points. “Most of the International Forward Coalition have signed up for the pilot so far. Only the Netherlands is pushing back.”
“Good,” said George. “I spoke to First Minister Pritchard’s people yesterday. He would like us to set up demonstrations with other Forward-friendly governments.”
“Dad, do you really want us in the middle of all this?” said Ben. “If people are pirating intellectual property, we should absolutely help stop them. Tracking down infringement and cooperating with the local authorities makes sense. But a lot of what Clearing House will do is damn close to secret policing. Do we really want to get involved there? It sounds very political…”
“Of course, it’s politics!” George exploded.
“Ben, there is always dialogue between the public and private sectors,” said Shaun. “A company depends on laws and regulations.” He was happy to take this opportunity to educate Ben. “BHJ exists because of the local legal frameworks that support us. Atlantis and the Caliph have their own frameworks which don’t fit our business models, so naturally we will support the governments which support us...”
“Shaun, you are one slimy little fucking toad, aren’t you?” said Ben. “You’d make murdering your grandmother sound boring. You just say whatever you are told…”
“Ben!” George snapped.
“Christ! Okay, sorry!”
“Actually, Shaun, could you pop down and make sure everything is set up?” George suggested in his most composed voice. “Ben and I will be down in a few minutes.”
“Sure,” Shaun replied, surprised and somewhat dismayed at this dismissal.
George waited for the door to close behind him, then glared at Ben. “Why does it always have to be a fight!”
“Oh, bloody hell, not this again!”
“Ben! It’s your company too—or will be, one day. Do you want the Pinkos to ruin us!”
“I’m not arguing,” Ben pleaded. “You’re right. But Shaun is a soulless, arse-kissing twat.”
“He’s not a fool, Ben.”
“I know. He just gets me. He doesn’t care about anything other than his own skin and career.”
George looked, one eyebrow raised.
“You want me to be more like him, don’t you?” Ben asked.
“If you just cared about your career half as much as you care about your clothes…”
“What’s wrong with my clothes?”
“Too flashy.”
“Whatever,” Ben sighed. He had actually gone to the trouble of choosing a standard dark suit and grey socks for his presentation today—perhaps George thought the cobalt blue handkerchief in his pocket was too much. More likely, his father’s mind had just blundered into one of the conversational cul-de-sacs that littered their relationship.
“Shall we go down?” said Ben. “The thing starts in ten minutes.”
“Yes, I don’t want you to be late. Get ready.” George sighed. “But you get the significance of this?”
“Yes, Dad. Kin factories churning out cheap knock-offs and eroding our profits?”
“Kin! My goodness!” George shouted. “Call a spade a spade! They are crime cartels, churning out counterfeit drugs, guns and chips. But maybe more dangerous, their Mesh of lies spreads the Atlantis luxury communism nonsense, which gets the chattering classes het up and indignant. This is what Pritchard is worried about. And I don’t need to remind you how much of our business comes from our favourable relationship with the Forward Coalition.”
“Got it! I’ll stick to what we prepared.”
“Yes. Stick to what’s written on the cards. You go on down, I’ll see you in there.”
It was bad form to blit between locations. It spoilt the illusion of presence and was considered lazy. It was the type of thing that George would have shunned fastidiously until his illness had sapped his apparently endless supplies of stoicism.
George was eighty-nine and the best of the world’s medical technologies were holding him together. Naked, he looked like a drug mule with oddly shaped subcutaneous bulges dotting his blotchy, grey midriff. These bulges housed an artificial kidney, liver and two hundred grams of bone marrow. A biomechanical heart circulated his blood—or, more precisely, the blood, as George wasn’t its original owner. Two dozen hand-picked vegan teenagers made donations each week to keep George’s plasma topped up. But it wasn’t enough. Cancer was running rife and organs were failing, one after another, like cheap light bulbs on a Christmas tree.
George was now confined to an antimicrobial intensive care sac. His body was cybernetically sustained and his mind was free to wander through surgically attached Spex. The doctors thought they might be able to keep him stable for the four or five more years it would take them to prepare his next ambitious round of treatments: orbital medicine was just getting started, but 3D printing in zero-gravity was already allowing organs—and limbs—to be printed at resolutions impossible on Earth. A few years back, MicroGMedical had proudly run ads showing its first fabbed thumb being printed, de-orbited and attached. The resolution of the tissue printing was so high that the money shot showed the unfortunate—or re-fortunate—ad’s protagonist, smiling to camera, while unlocking his Companion with his newly printed, hot-off-the-press thumb. BHJ was a heavy investor, keen on hurrying the tech along in time for a new human body to be readied for their chairman.
Ben trotted up the three steps to the stage. Shaun and his father were already there. Shaun was fussing with his microphone, George looking as airbrushed and impeccable as only the virtual can. A few hundred employees, analysts and press from within their tight-knit and tight-lipped community made up the select audience. Ben ignored them and shook Shaun’s hand and pantomimed shaking his father’s.
When the time came, the lights dimmed and spots picked out BHJ’s chairman, the old man’s avatar reacting in real time to the shifting illumination. A montage of inspirational shots played on the screen behind George; glorious achievements composited from BHJ’s portfolio.
George spoke first. He smiled and sipped water while delivering a smooth, twenty-minute monologue on macroeconomics, which was mostly company horn blowing and a tedious recap of former triumphs—basically the usual town hall blah blah. But then George took a dark turn, drawing the audience’s attention to the ruin they were sleepwalking towards. People sat up and a few more Camera Bees ambled into the air. But George didn’t elaborate, contenting himself at this point with dispersing a few vague accusations in the direction of the digital insurgency. He was referring to what had until recently been called economics 2.0. For the previous six months, propaganda bots across Forward Europe had been seeding the æther with the suggestion, and then conviction, that the Kin were not, after all, hobbyists and industrious entrepreneurs, but were in fact terrorists lurking in their parents’ basements, manufacturing the weapons of mass destruction which would soon be deployed to wipe all traces of honest commerce from the face of the planet.
“But fear not!” continued George. “Joining me on the stage today we have Ben, VP of ‘Clearing House’, a new organisational unit we are launching today to provide services to our sovereign customers. And Shaun, VP of Persua
sive Technology, our top performing unit for four years in a row! BHJ’s best! We think of them as our sons!”
Sons!? Ben seethed quietly. What the fuck? How embarrassing!
“Shaun, over to you!”
“Thanks, George,” Shaun said, his ridiculous pencil-thin manicured eyebrows bobbing and his stupid dimples clenched. “It’s a real pleasure for me to stand here before you, team and key customers alike.” He scanned the crowd, making eye contact with selected favourites. “With Çin on board, BHJ accounts for over sixty per cent of the global Cognitive Lobbying sector. As George said, Persuasive Technology has been BHJ’s highest grossing division four years in a row now. This reflects the world’s appetite for effective one-to-many communication. At BHJ, we are the world leader. We understand this challenge, we have the best people and we apply the best sociological principles to our Cog models. People want to be part of something bigger than them, we understand this. Our Sages create the narratives that move whole countries and cultures.”
George, still standing behind Shaun, stepped forward into the beam of a spot. “That’s great, Shaun. Really top-notch stuff.”
“Thanks, George. It’s all down to your vision, but we do our best to follow the course you have set,” Shaun smarmed. “However, as you know, it’s not all positive. Despite our continuing deployment of Synthetic Cognition capacity, public opinion is slipping. Our partners, especially sovereign entities, see dangerous new ideas taking hold on the unregulated Mesh. Many fear a return to the chaos of the Great Contraction and the lost decade. Our primary business model is under threat. But we can leverage our unique position with Persuasive Technologies, as well as our massive deployed base of executive Sages, to provide unparalleled insight to our top-tier sovereign partners. Ben, why don’t you take it from here?”
Lights dimmed further and another slick animation began to play.
Boardrooms from Beiping to Berlin; happy people smiling at each other, reaching over one another’s shoulders to move apparently crucial pieces of paper, or point at salient items on pages; architectural wonders spiralling from the digital into the Real; ubiquitous oids joining the humans in all their fun work…
“Many thanks, Shaun,” said Ben. “I am excited to have this opportunity to speak to you all and to give you a glimpse of BHJ’s latest service. As Shaun said, this is a challenging time. The enemies of our way of life are proliferating. And here, let’s be clear—we are talking about the Mesh, the Cartels, the Klans. Groups which flaunt international law and brazenly announce their intention to bring down our globalised society. They want to topple the systems we have built, through hard work and cooperation, and bring it all down with violent revolution. As George said, these are the new digital insurgents. In plain terms, they are terrorists.”
Ben, reading from his private teleprompt, paused for a few seconds to gauge the audience. This was uncharacteristically tough talk for BHJ, a company that usually preferred to lurk in the background, letting its customers take all the credit and the limelight for the media content its servers generated and for the successes its army of executive Sages enabled.
As the background media continued to play, Ben read on. “With our position in the market as the key provider of corporate Sages…”
The camera, pulling back, shows an animated globe highlighting the hundreds of thousands of Sages working as assistants and executives at top-tier companies around the world—
“…we have access to millions of data points. Media houses drive their mOids with cognitive services from the BHJ cloud…”
A gynoid finishes dancing and leaves the stage. A little later, a boy, in an effort to impress her, boasts about a new drug he picked up recently. An executive asks his Sage assistant to order precision-printed components from an illegal Mesh market place. A tattooed and pierced nerd—clearly up to no good—chats to his wifu… The animation pulls back, revealing a web of information streaming between the Sages and BHJ datacentres.
“…all this access gives BHJ unparalleled insight into the criminal behaviour that a very small minority of our customers insist on pursuing. Privacy is a concern, but our new double-blind technology allows specially trained Sages to analyse anonymised social intelligence within firewalled enclaves. Only red flags are passed on. We have an eighty per cent hit rate, and human analysts first verify with anonymised data before a further process of cross-checking verifies illegal activity or intent…”
There was some shuffling and murmuring in the audience.
“The important point here,” continued Ben, “is that the underemployed are frustrated and moving in large numbers into the illegal economy. Analysis shows that we are approaching a tipping point. In the past, without the perspective we currently enjoy, the world would be heading towards inevitable chaos and revolution. Cognitive Lobbying and Persuasive Technology have helped minimise and delay these threats from society’s dangerous fringe. But naïve, dangerous ideas are spreading, effluent from all the illegal data swamps, rife with latent insurgent threats. They have been allowed to grow. This is undermining our own messages, confusing the narrative and rendering our programs less effective.”
A man at the front looked at Ben eagerly and raised a hand. Ben looked away; he was nearly done reading his lines, anyway.
“We have resolved to offer a new service to our sovereign clients, providing them with the intelligence they need to drain these festering reservoirs…”
Ben’s mic was cut and a spot picked out the audience member with the extended arm. He was very thin, sitting with impeccable posture, his arm raised confidently. There was something weird about the guy that Ben couldn’t place. He was wearing a very tight black business suit and owned a face so bland that, apart from rosy blush disks on his cheeks, blandness was its only notable idiosyncrasy.
Some idiot in the lighting booth hadn’t got the message that questions would come at the end.
“Thank you for taking my question,” said the ruddy-cheeked interlocutor. “The digital insurgency sounds terrifying, I had no idea. If I understand, they are working to bring down our society? Can you tell me what are their demands? What are they threatening us with? What can we do?”
Ben moved to answer, but his mic was still muted. After some silent mouth movement and a brief awkward pause, George stood up from his chair, and immediately a spot picked him out.
“Wealth,” he began, “comes over generations through careful stewardship and savvy investing. It’s a member of the family to be protected. Most reasonable people understand this. But there are others who aren’t reasonable, and they don’t respect the stability we have created, because they didn’t help make it. They want to bring this system down! We need to protect the existing order against these threats. Our wealth must be protected from the undeserving poor!”
Ben looked incredulously at his father. What was George saying?! Money a member of the family? Who was this supposed to be playing to? It made the Old Man and BHJ itself look like some evil corporate elitist caricature…
The thin man nodded. “You are saying that the terrorists want to bring down the rich who have cornered all the wealth? I guess we all understand this is true. But how will they achieve this? How are they working to overthrow us?”
“These are often the unproductive and underemployed,” replied George. “Sages and domestic mAIds have annihilated the employment market at the top and the bottom. They might be worthless to the economy, but they are dangerous…” He was suddenly cut off again by the audience member, whose microphone seemed to have the power to silence all others…
“I see,” the man said. “We have pushed the poor out of work. We have pacified them with synthetic media sedatives, but now this propaganda factory is losing its power. People are getting bored with affairs and long-lost cousins with amnesia. People are getting immune to your not-so-craftily hidden messages. You are scared of the Mesh, which has its own trending shows; unreasonably popular with this contrarian demographic. You have pushe
d them too far and now you say they have become dangerous. But what is the threat really?”
Ben looked to a couple of security men, who had moved to the sides of the room, ready to eject the questioner, who had now stood and was orating with increasing animation.
Ben couldn’t understand why George was entertaining this troublemaker.
“Only two per cent of manufacturing takes place in Mesh Fab Shops,” the man continued. “Mostly serving remote communities, providing essential medicines and electronics…” The emaciated agitator continued as a new montage began to play…
An Open Launch Vehicle rocket delivers pizza to a grinning cosmonaut; a GliderKite drops medicines to a village of mud huts; a ScumWhale gulps down a clump of plastic junk; dolphins are swimming through the canals of Atlantis City; somewhere, out in cold, interplanetary space, an asteroid is manoeuvring…
“I see hope and industry!” cried the agitator. “The only threat I see is to the old rich, who would prefer to murder than let their sheeple escape from the farm.”
